Aoki Hiroyuki's most successful entrepreneurial history has also experienced a process from scratch. With 10000 dollars earned from ice cream trading, he opened a Japanese steak house called "Honghua". The restaurant is located on West 56th Street in new york City. In the first few years, business rose and fell, but the restaurant gradually attracted more and more guests because of its delicious food and special atmosphere, and finally became a gathering place for celebrities. (［Muhammad Ali］ and the members of The Beatles had dinner there. Aoki Hiroyuki took advantage of the success of the first restaurant to expand the safflower brand into a chain store, which started in new york City and later spread to the United States and even the world. Today, safflower Japanese cuisine has spread all over the world 17 countries. In 2008, Aoki Hiroyuki passed away, and it is estimated that his business empire is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His personal color is very distinct, and his famous name coexists with his biological father's confirmation lawsuit, family lawsuit, a lot of antique cars, many strange hobbies, and the origin of the name of the chain store with rich national color and a little mystery (Aoki's father saw a red flower in the ruins when the United States bombed Tokyo during World War II).
Everyone who has been to Honghua Japanese cuisine can feel the uniqueness of this restaurant. Chefs will cook for you in front of you, but in fact, the word "cooking" is far from describing the superb skills of chefs. The chefs of safflower Japanese cuisine are simply masters of art: knives fly in the air, throw food directly into your plate with a spatula, and create onion ring volcanoes! Only in Honghua Restaurant will a meal end with applause. If you search for "safflower" or "Japanese barbecue chef" on YouTube, you can see hundreds of videos related to it, with tens of thousands of hits, which show the subtlety of cooking skills. All these have indirectly contributed to the success of Honghua Japanese cuisine. What Aoki Hiroyuki did was far from creating a little entertainment effect. He deeply understood the scarcity problem faced by the catering industry and came up with a solution.
People always think that the magic weapon of a restaurant is the dishes, decoration and service. After all, that's all we experience as guests. But as we all know, some restaurants that have performed very well in these aspects still cannot escape the fate of bankruptcy. Letting guests walk in the door does not ensure the success of the restaurant. What drives the profitability of restaurants is boring logistics and operational decisions. The problem faced by restaurants is that most of the costs are fixed. Of course, restaurants have to spend money on food, but the cost of raw materials is not as much as the daily expenses. Daily expenses generally include employee's salary, store rent, electricity fee, insurance, etc. Whether you serve a large group of guests or only a few guests, the total amount of daily expenses will not be much different. Therefore, doing business is to find ways to make money. When the amount of income can offset the fixed cost, a large part of the rest can be directly classified as income. In this way, we can work out a very interesting account. On a busy Saturday night, if there are three seats, the profitability of these three seats is far more than 50% of that of the two seats. If two seats can offset the fixed cost and leave you a little profit, then the third seat is "oil and water"-the income earned from the third seat is basically all profits.
Aoki realized that what is really scarce in the catering industry is seat resources. As a manager, how many seats can you put in the restaurant? If more dining tables can be arranged, there will be more seats. If each table can accommodate more people, there will be more seats. If the turnover of table diners can be realized at a faster speed, and each table can entertain four rounds of guests instead of three rounds every night, it will mean more seats.
The cooking performance of Honghua Japanese cuisine is actually a very clever way to solve the scarcity problem. The chef's performance requires diners to sit at the common table and watch. A common dining table for 8 people can accommodate guests more effectively. If four people go to dinner together, you don't have to wait for the two adjacent couples to finish eating. With a common dining table, just let guests sit next to each other. A dining table for four is just a table with four chairs around it. Moreover, the turnover rate of safflower Japanese cuisine has become higher. The chef's cooking in front of you is exquisite and quick. You go into the restaurant and find a seat, and the chef will stand in the middle and stand by. The menu is very concise and the time for ordering is limited. Then, the chef will happily cook the dishes for you step by step and throw the food on your plate. You must finish it quickly, because then you can see how the next dish that is about to be thrown into your plate is cooked. Even dessert ice cream is designed with the intention of making guests eat it quickly, because in an open cooking environment like Honghua Japanese cuisine, ice cream will soon melt. At the end of the cooking performance, the chef bows, the guests applaud and the meal is over. What do you want to do after that, continue to sit in your seat and bite chopsticks? The chef stood there, and when it was all over, the waiter had already cleaned the table and everyone else was ready to leave. In this case, no one really wanted to dawdle. And this means that safflower Japanese food can earn more money from every table every night. It is estimated that compared with other restaurants, the profit of Honghua Japanese cuisine per 1 dollar is 10 cents more.